


From Songs and Sonnets

by shinyhappyfitsofrage



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Drabble, Drabble Collection, F/M, Fluff, Mini Fic, smol mini fics that will become big
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-08-29 08:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8482144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinyhappyfitsofrage/pseuds/shinyhappyfitsofrage
Summary: It was, after all, a little bit like poetry: a lot of heartbeats, forced into just a few short stanzas.[a drabble per poem in John Donne's "Songs and Sonnets", concerning Artemis and Wally]





	1. the flea

**Author's Note:**

> in my british literature class, we read John Donne's "The Sun Rising". as my professor talked us through the meter, the historical context, the language, all i could think about was how much it reminded me of an apartment in Palo Alto. We think of poetry as so flat, so constrained and boring but the truth is poetry is anything but. poets are capable of saying in just a few words what we struggle to say our whole lives. and poetry can be thrilling, dangerous, sexy; it can be compassionate, still. it can convey terrible, hopeless wanting and desperate passion, and above all it can (and perhaps was built to) convey love, in its rawest and purest sense.
> 
> each drabble in this work is inspired by a poem in John Donne's "Songs and Sonnets". they go in the order the poems are originally in. i am uploading each drabble as a separate chapter because i have no idea when i will finish this but it works best if you read it as one whole work rather than chapter by chapter.

_"This flea is you and I, and this_   
_Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is."_

Wally realizes for the first time the real implications of super metabolism on a hot July night in Gotham City, one of the nights where the air sticks to you like a second skin. The sounds of the streets bubble over normal levels, and it feels like Gotham is on the verge of something, of a great something, or maybe that just him. He’s eighteen, and he moves from Central City, Missouri, to Stanford, California in a month, and Artemis has pulled the champagne she’d been hiding in her closet out from under her winter sweaters to pop the cork into the alley below her apartment. He’s both terrified and exhilarated, from being in love with her, from growing up with her, and from taking his first swig of alcohol on a fire escape on a night that is on the brink of everything.

Except, as it turns out, he is physically incapable of getting drunk, thanks to a little experiment he did when he was, like, twelve. After an hour he’s given up, and he hands the bottle to Artemis, who is three swigs in and is already flushed and giddy, and who gasps aloud, covering her mouth from her hand, when she almost drops the bottle onto the street below.

“I have a secret,” she whispers, two drinks in, stumbling to sit down next to him. She laughs into his ear, collects herself, and says, “You’re my boyfriend.”

Wally gapes at her, raising his eyebrows so high that she snorts. “ _What_? You and _me_? Dating? This is so shocking to me, Artemis?”

She shoves him, her arm slipping against his shoulder, and sighs, leaning against him, running her fingers across the back of his hand. “You have a mosquito bite,” she says, sounding genuinely worried.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, briefly glancing down at the barely visible red bump forming behind his ring finger. “I think I will most likely live.”

Artemis doesn’t look up, still running her fingers along the bite. “I hope it bites me too,” she says suddenly. “Cuz then it will – it’ll have, you know, we’ll be together – we’ll both be in it.”

Wally can’t help but laugh out loud, throwing his head back. She giggles too, but not with the same gusto, and the look in her eyes is completely serious. “If only you were this nice to me when sober.”

“I _am_ nice to you!” she says, affronted, her mouth hanging open in dismay. “Hones’ly – honest, what the _fuck_ , Wally. I am so, _so_ , nice to you. All of – every time. Always.”

He laughs again, which only serves to make her more offended. It’s only three minutes from midnight and still Wally feels like tomorrow might never come, and even though the smog can try to hide it, he swears Gotham is glowing, all for them. And in the morning, as he walks to the 7/11 to buy a rather hungover Artemis an iced coffee and some Tylenol, even though the brownstones are crumbling and the cars in the street honk and swerve where they shouldn’t and the river is a murky green, even though it’s _Gotham City_ , on the beginning of another hot July day of no AC in Artemis’s apartment, it still does glow. Just a little bit. Just for him.


	2. the good-morrow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> incredibly, utterly overjoyed that the impossible has happened and this amazing show has been renewed. hopefully this will convince me to update more often. we all made season 3 happened and I am honestly just. wow.

_"Where can we find two better hemispheres,_  
_Without sharp north, without declining west?"_

BIALYA. He tells her they’re in Bialya and she believes him, although she has no reason to – he’s a stranger, a boy she’d never seen before who woke her up in an abandoned, creaking shack. And he asks her not to be afraid. It’s ludicrous. He may be the Kid Flash but she’s just a fifteen year old kid from Gotham City who doesn’t even have a passport, and sure, she can defend herself but she can’t fight a war.

Of course, a few hours later she realizes this is all in fact a lie, and that she’s more than just a fifteen year old, and she has fought wars and will continue to do so, and instead of a stranger the Kid Flash is an annoying boy named Wally whom she passes on the way to training and snivels at. She’d never willingly let Wally carry her out of the danger-zone before they met in Bialya, and she’d never willingly gripped his hand, digging her fingernails into his palm as if she was afraid he’d disappear.

Later, she realizes that it was her first time travelling outside of the United States. It’s not an interesting or particularly exciting revelation. It’s not like she actually experienced Bialya, after all. All she got out of it was sand in her hair and an odd, burning sensation along her finger tips. All she saw was a flash of light as Wally scooped her up like it was nothing (although she could feel in his arms that it wasn’t) and raced across the desert.

PARIS. She sits at an outdoor café, sipping a latte and picking some sort of pastry apart with her fingers. The Eiffel Tower is visible from her table, the sun passing behind it and shining in her eyes. Her phone sits next to her coffee cup, and Artemis is thankful to the ridiculously high international carrier rates for giving her a valid reason to go on airplane mode, instead of just being sick of text after text of “Are you okay?”

She isn’t really sure why she thought this would make her feel better. It’s the City of Lights and the City of Love, two things she has avoided fiercely for almost a month now. She’d felt obligated to come, she supposes, carrying out Wally’s last, unrealistic, romantic fantasy he’d ever had for them. But _them_ is a key word, and the more Artemis wanders the city by herself the more she feels unwelcome.

She cancels the second night of her hotel reservation and gets the next flight back to Gotham. On the plane, she stares out the window at the city as they ascend. She will never come back to Paris.

PALO ALTO. She wakes up when the sun hits her eyelids, and sighs in annoyance and rolls over. She’d told Wally a thousand times that she was going to buy new curtains to replace the shitty ones Stanford had provided, and he’d nodded in assent a thousand times, and each time she had forgotten or been too lazy, or gone to the store to buy them and instead had come home with groceries and new movies from Redbox. Now she was awake at 5:57am, five hours earlier than necessary. She closes her eyes in rebellion for a few more moments, before giving up and sitting up, reaching with one hand for her phone.

Wally murmurs something in his sleep, utterly unintelligible. Artemis glances over at him. He’s turned on his side, facing her, his hair matted against the pillow (he really does need a haircut). The sheets slide off his bare shoulder. His chest rises and falls. She’d been asleep last night when she’d felt him stumble into bed, pulling the blankets over him as he collapsed onto the pillow, his nose just brushing against her hair. She’d hummed vaguely in response. “Sorry, go to sleep,” he’d mumbled. “I love you.”

She smiles, almost afraid to do so, like if she acknowledges this moment the universe will rip it apart, like it has ripped up all the others. But for a moment, she is sure time has folded over itself to create a bubble, just for her, and she is sure that if she never again steps foot off this bed she still would have seen everything the world has to offer her.

She never does buy those curtains.


	3. song pt. i

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> reminder to check me out as iartemisswally at tumblr.com!

_"Though she were true when you met her_  
_And last, till you write your letter_  
_Yet she_  
_Will be  
_ _False, ere I come, to two or three."_

Wally doesn’t finish his dinner that night, which is of course a mark of great catastrophe and inner turmoil in the West house. He knows, when he excuses himself early, half a steak still on his plate, that low whispers from his parents will arise the moment he pushes his chair in with unnecessary force and stalks up the stairs. And normally, he would’ve stayed and finished the steak regardless of the sick, knotted feeling in the pit of his stomach just to avoid later questioning, however well-intentioned, from his mother.

But it’s different this time, because it’s not the food he’s avoiding. It’s the table, and the conspiratorial glances from his father, and the sly, carefully worded questions about the team, and about certain teammates in particular. A few days ago, he’d mumbled under his breath that Artemis Crock, demon queen of the damned herself, was “really not all that bad” and sometimes she had the ability to be “pretty funny”, and his dad had hidden his smile behind a generously poured glass of wine and merely said, “Oh.” Wally had felt flustered and embarrassed, but also freed, like this gentle soap bubble of a realization was now out in the open and not trapped inside him.

That was a week ago, though. Everything now is different. When he sits down at the table, and his father asks, “So, how’s Artemis?”, the question feels unbearable. Wally manages a thin smile and says something generic, not really paying attention. The congenial chatter at the dinner table doesn’t line up with the sounds in his head, metallic clattering and a heavy, defeated exhalation, and eventually it starts to give him a headache.

“I’m done,” he says, halfway through his meal. His mother looks up in alarm.

“You only ate half your plate,” she says, shooting an almost horrified look at his father.

Wally shrugs. “I ate before I got home.” It’s a lie, and he truthfully could’ve eaten more, and later that night he does in fact sneak downstairs, eating leftovers while leaning against the open fridge door. For now, he scrapes the rest of his plate into a Tupperware container and heads up to his room.

* * *

“She didn’t betray you,” says Dick on the phone that night, as Wally lies on his bed watching the model solar system swinging ever so slightly from the ceiling.

He frowns. “Uh, am I missing something here? Is ‘Purposefully and With Intention Sabotaging an Entire Mission to Make Myself Feel Better’ the new fun trend among teens?”

Dick sighs, as if he is an incredibly wise, exhausted Obi-Wan who has had it up to here with Anakin’s bullshit, rather than a snot-nosed thirteen year old. “I didn’t say she didn’t mess up. What I said is that she didn’t betray _you_. Artemis didn’t make a mistake – a _mistake_ , by the way – thinking, ‘Wow, here’s a way I can make specifically Wally West pissed’. It’s not about you, it’s about her, and maybe if you weren’t having a temper tantrum you would be asking her why.”

Wally bristles. “I already _know_ why, it’s because she’s a self-obsessed, insecure _brat_ , who was more concerned with her reputation than actually getting the job done.”

“And if we all think very, very hard, and look back at the way _some_ of us constantly rag on her for not being a hundred percent perfect all the time, we might figure out why she felt a _little_ threatened by someone with her exact abilities joining the team.”

“Would you shut up?” Wally sits up, gripping the edge of his bed, his other hand clenching around the phone. Blood is roaring in his ears. “Why are you making this about me? This isn’t about me, okay? I never said it was. I’m just pissed, understandably, because this is – it’s –“

“Personal?” finishes Dick, and Wally resists the urge to reach into the phone and smack the smug, all-knowing look he is sure is on Dick’s face right now. “Because you were just starting to like her?”

He’s had enough. “You know what – I’m done with the Doctor Phil shit, okay? See you tomorrow.” Wally snaps the phone shut almost venomously. He slams it down on the bed, and groans, running his hands through his hair. Dick is wrong. He’s completely, utterly wrong. This has nothing to do with – with _liking_ Artemis. God. It’s the principle of what happened, the fact that she would lie to them.

Still.

As he falls asleep that night, he sees Artemis’s face, the heavy, hollow nod she acknowledges Roy’s accusations with, and he feels his chest caving in again, because as hard as he tries he can’t reconcile this Artemis with the one that laughed despite herself at his jokes, the one who knocked hesitantly on his door, a bootleg copy of _Inception_ in her hand. He can’t make this Artemis fit with the one who pulled his broken arm into a make-shift spring in the mud of the bayou, fingers trembling as they brushed against his collarbone.

And Wally feels like an idiot for assuming there was just the one.


	4. woman's constancy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> friends!!! i started a young justice gift exchange collection, please consider signing up! it will be so much fun! http://archiveofourown.org/collections/young_justice_xmas_2016 here is the link that hopefully works

_"Or, as true deaths true marriages untie,_   
_So lovers' contracts, images of those,_   
_Bind but till sleep, death's image, them unloose?"_

“I need to not be alone tonight,” she mumbles, apparently ignoring that _tonight_ was long gone at this point. It is two am, and Wally blinks blearily at her, leaning heavily against his door. Her hair spills down her shoulders, for once freed from the usual ponytail, and she digs her nails into her forearm. The bruise under her eye hasn’t quite found itself yet but there’s already a bit of red pooling on her cheekbone. It’s an omen.

The starkness of her confession is unnerving, to say the least. They hadn’t spoken once during the day, aside from a withering interaction in the kitchen that left the sole witness, M’gann, on the verge of tears. Most days, Wally did an impeccable job of tenaciously avoiding any trace of her, even when their shoulders brushed accidentally in the hall, even when their eyes met when they each glanced at the other. They’d broken up three weeks ago and although she’d clumsily texted him “still friends?” after the fact, the words still tasted metallic on his tongue and so far the best they could do was a clinical, professional silence.

But that was then and this is now, a hoarse, dream-like two am that feels more and more with each passing moment like midnight. Artemis is usually the picture of pride, with her knife-sharpened spine and steel eyes, but now she is almost folded, biting her lip, and her eyes are offset by the goddamn bruise. Wally can still see Sportsmaster, still hear the hockey stick, whistling past his ears to slam into her cheekbone. He steps aside to let her enter.

“I think I am dying,” she whispers to his collarbone, at about three am (it still feels like midnight). They’re under the blankets and Wally rubs her back, unsure of what else to do. “I really think I am.”

“You’re not,” he says. “You’re going to be fine.” Of course it’s a lie. Everyone is always dying, and they in particular seem to be constantly hurtling towards it, stopping just short every damn time. In the dark, however, they are able to ignore the finer details.

She clutches at his back and breathes in. “Every time I think I’m fine – I’m not,” she says, and the words fall, heavy and thick, onto the floor. Neither of them bother to pick them up. Artemis sighs, and he moves his chin away as she raises her head. She studies him. "Sometimes I think I still love you," she says. 

Wally's heart doesn't beat as much as clatter. He doesn't know how she can _still_ love him when she never mentioned she'd begun loving him at all. He doesn't know what she's doing right now, telling him this while he watches something dark and tender bubbling under her left eye, at a midnight 3am. He doesn't know what to say.

He doesn't know a lot, apparently.

For a fleeting moment, Wally wonders Artemis remembers that he's real, and that his bed and this room still exist within the fabric of their reality, and not outside of it, a hideaway untouched by _it's over_ and  _get out_ and blank stares. He nods. "I know," he says eventually. It's enough.

In the morning, he wakes before she does, jumping at the sound of a door slamming in the hallway. The sun shines in through the window, landing squarely on her face. The bruise has fully arrived, a rich blue-black. For a few moments, split halves of heart beats, he is able to stay still, before he gives up and hastily presses his lips to her temple, and slips out of bed.

Later that day, they pass each other in hallway. They don’t speak.


	5. the undertaking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is messy , something i wrote while i avoided doing work. also i just finished the x-files in 5 weeks and i literally want to die im suffering. also, im sorry for two in a row about her father! also, a bit of an au.

" _I have done one braver thing  
Than all the Worthies did"_

It isn’t until she’s twenty that she’s able to feel a semblance of pity towards him.

And even then, even at that pivotal moment as she locks eyes with her father and feels a lurch of _something_ , feels the discomfort of remembering that at some point, he must have loved her, must have loved Jade, and love doesn’t bruise as much as rot, and that it’s probably still somewhere inside of him, festering and groaning – even at _that_ moment, the pity is twisted and convoluted, mixed in with her own fear, her father’s rage, her lover’s trembling. He has a knife to Wally’s throat, a fist clenched around his hair, and there is something about his stance that makes him look unhinged.

“You’re really gonna leave all this?” he sneers, trying to goad her. “Leave this to play house with _him_?” He spits blood out of his mouth and shakes Wally a little. Wally, just barely floating above consciousness, mumbles something in protest. Artemis feels the arch of her back start to ache but she ignores it. Her arrow is pointed at Lawrence’s neck. “This is the _life_ , baby-girl. You and me, in the heart of battle. This is your birthright.”

 _Birthright_. There’s a photo on the wall back home in Gotham of her as a newborn, in her mother’s arms, in Gotham City Memorial Hospital. Jade stands petulantly by the hospital bed. Her father’s oversized hand traces a pattern on her mother’s shoulder. October 1995. She’d taken the framed photo and smashed it onto the ground a hundred times if she did it once. Every time it had somehow reappeared the next day. New frame, new glass, same photo.

It’s the only picture they have that suggests that they might have been a family. _Her birthright_. She wonders, somewhere in the back of her adrenaline riddled, _ohgodohgodohgod_ mind, if he was planning on shoving a knife into her grasping hand even then. If it had always been her destiny, like he swears.

She wonders if he remembers that photo, that moment in time. October 1995, when the rot began. She supposes he doesn’t, that he’s buried it so deep it might never resurface. “Do you remember….” she starts to say, her mouth dry, back in 2015. And then she stops herself. If he did he wouldn’t be here.

If he did he might’ve understood why an apartment in California that is just big enough for two people is so attractive. He might’ve understood her double major at Stanford, might’ve understood quitting the League, might’ve understood the quiet, fierce delight from buying groceries and paying bills and having a home that is _hers, his, theirs_. He might’ve understood looking at someone else and caring about them, knowing them, truly, earnestly, loving them.

But he doesn’t. After twenty years, Artemis knows better than to try to explain it to him. She takes a deep breath. She lets her arrow fly.


End file.
